Is Dublin busy? Ask some huskies, of course (infographic)

Christmas shopping season is a frantic time of queues, stress, traffic, parking and exhaustion. So it’s probably best you know when it’s busy, when it’s quiet, where you can park and when to call it off and wait until tomorrow.

A new website, isdublinbusy.com, sets out to help us out, in that regard, collating a bunch of different live data sets to reveal real-time traffic, parking, Dublin bike bay and footfall traffic.

Somewhat surprisingly for me, though not for anyone else in my better-educated office, research from the makers of the website (In The Company of Huskies) shows that Christmas Eve is the quietest time to shop. 19 December is, under Huskies’ warning, to be avoided “at all costs”.

Sundays tend to be better choices, with mornings the best time of day to beat the crowds. Now, this is all relative. The ‘quietest day’ does not mean a quiet day, rather the least hectic.

Christmas shopping madness

The live data on the site is quite impressive, really. Well laid out information on specific car parks (there are three spots free in Arnotts right this second), M50 journey times, live traffic cams and public transport Twitter feeds make it as easy as ever to weigh up your options.

“We believe that data provides the foundation to all our solutions, so it made sense to utilise this publicly available data to help with the Christmas panic,” said Lillian Gallagher, head of data and analytics at Huskies.

“For example, we calculated the busiest 10 hours of December that should be avoided at all costs. We deemed them our ‘Xmas Black Spots’!”

Take a gander at what they’ve come up with – plenty of which is included in the infographic below – and, if you’re about to brave the city streets, best check in ahead of time.